cupboards
and corners peculiar to such edifices; an organ-loft, from which weird
noises issue at every opening or closing of a door; a vaulted roof,
which echoes one's footsteps with a moan, as of some outraged spirit
hovering in empty space, and ejaculating piteously, "Another impious
intruder after the sacramental plate! another plebeian sole trampling
on the brasses of the De Montacutes, lords of the manor!"

The vestry is, if anything, more ghostly than the general run of
vestries; but the business mind is compelled to waive all
considerations of a supernatural character. For the moment there
flashed across my brain the shadows of all the Christmas stories I had
ever read or heard concerning vestries; the phantom bridal, in which
the bride's beautiful white hand changed to the bony fingers of a
skeleton as she signed the register; the unearthly christening, in
which all at once, after the ceremony having been conducted with the
utmost respectability, to the edification of the unauthorised intruder
hiding behind a pillar, the godfathers and godmothers, nurse and baby,
priest and clerk, became in a moment dilapidated corpses; whereon the
appalled intruder fell prone at the foot of his pillar, there to be
discovered the next morning by his friends, and the public generally,
with his hair blanched to an awful whiteness, or his noble intellect
degraded to idiocy. For a moment, the memory of about a hundred
Christmas stories was too much for me--so weird of aspect and earthy of
atmosphere was the vestry at Spotswold. And then "being gone" the
shadows of the Christmas stories, I was a man and a lawyer's clerk
again, and set myself assiduously to search the registers and
interrogate my ancient.

I found that individual a creature of mental fogginess compared with
whom my oldest inhabitant of Ullerton would have been a Pitt, Earl of
Chatham. But I questioned and cross-questioned him until I had in a
manner turned his poor old wits the seamy side without, and had
discovered, first, that he had never known any one called Haygarth in
the whole course of those seventy-five years' vegetation which
politeness compelled me to speak of as his "life;" secondly, that he
had never known any one who knew a Haygarth; thirdly, that he was
intimately acquainted with every creature in the village, and that he
knew that no one of the inhabitants could give me the smallest shred of
such information as I required.

Having extorted so much